Susan Murcott

Lecturer, D-Lab: Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) and D-Lab: Water, Climate Change and Health

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Susan Murcott, an environmental engineer with a focus on water, is a Lecturer in D-Lab where, for the past 12 years, she has been teaching D-Lab-Water, Sanitation, Hygiene (EC.715/11.474J) and more recently, D-Lab: Water, Climate Change, and Health (EC.719/EC.789). In spring of 2017, she co-taught D-Lab: Earth.

She has led MIT student teams in over 25 countries spanning five continents. In 2014-2015, she led the water filter evaluation of the Comprehensive Initiative on Technology Evaluation (CITE), a five-year USAID-funded project, to evaluate technologies for the poor. From 2005 to the present, she founded and helped establish the non-profit organization, Pure Home Water, with Ghanaian partners, which has built a ceramic pot filter factory to provide safe drinking water in northern Ghana.

From 2002 to the present, she has been the principal investigator of a team, in partnership with the Environment and Public Health Organization in Kathmandu, Nepal, that invented and has widely disseminated the KanchanTM Arsenic Filter, as well as being involved in MIT-funded emergency relief following the 2015 Nepal earthquake. Current related project: Manufacturing and Marketing E. coli Test Kits to Promote Safely Managed Drinking Water and Improved Public Health in Nepal.

Murcott is the author of over 50 professional papers as well as the book Arsenic in the World: an International Sourcebook (IWA, 2012-Link). 

Videos of Susan Murcott's work.